I have recently spent approximately 40 hours moving a course from Moodle to Populi. This course involves a great deal of online testing, giving me ample opportunity to discover glitches and bugs in the testing platform. I have the following suggestions to improve the testing platform. I would say that these suggestions are critical if the testing platform is going to be at all useful at anything more than a high school level. Certainly, in a university context, these things must be developed, or the testing platform will remain a gimmick.
1. Make test answers optionally case-sensitive. (This is already being worked on.) This is critical for some subjects.
2. Allow full formatting options (bold, underline, italics) for both questions and answers. For example, in a matching question, I can include italics in the question part, but not in the columns that need to be matched. In multiple choice questions, I can include italics in the question, but not in the various answer choices. Many of my answers contain something like this _word_, because I had no other way of highlighting the word that needed to be highlighted. Looks really unprofessional.
3. Allow proper formatting in all questions and answers. Forcing us to rely on _this_ to get this is a bit ridiculous, seeing as even in a suggestion feature box we can use a simple click of the button to get italics.
3. Allow attachments and photos in both test questions and answers.
4. Create a sliding scale for partial marks that includes more than 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100%. If I want to set a partial mark at 33 and 66%, for example, I have no way of doing that, but may need to do that in many questions.
5. Allow for the creation of multiple pages on a test. Having 80 questions on a single screen is a bit overwhelming.
6. Allow tests to be taken and graded in preview mode so that answers can be tested before the test goes live. It's really hard for me to be sure I've checked off every single answer (like over 600 of them) correctly without being able to take each test in preview mode to ensure that it's working correctly.
Features that I like so far:
1. The options for types of questions is great.
2. The fact that a new blank for answers automatically appears when the previous one is completed makes creating the tests easy.
3. The ability to move questions around easily is lovely.
4. The fact that short-answer questions that don't match the answer given are not marked wrong but are sent for manual grading and are grouped by questions for easy grading is brilliant. Populi wins hands-down over Moodle on this one.
Looking forward to giving this a hard test-drive this semester, and I'm lookign forward to the updates!
Marianne
